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Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos Betting on Malta Inc.

Several of the world’s wealthiest people, including Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, have invested in a new energy storage company, Malta Inc.

Malta Inc.’s New Way of Storing Electricity

The company was created when secretive Google lab X moonshot, decided to spin-off the electricity storage project into its own company, Malta Inc. Malta Inc. uses molten salt to store electricity instead of traditional lithium ions. The new process promises to allow electricity to be stored more efficiently than the current methods. In a world increasingly reliant on batteries, many of the world’s top investors believe this new technology has potential for the future of energy storage.

An Impressive List of Investors

Recently Malta Inc. raised a $26 million round of Series-A round funding led by Bill Gates’, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, LLC. The Bill Gates led fund includes an impressive list of investors including Jeff Bezos, Ray Dalio, Michael Bloomberg, John Doerr, and SoftBank CEO, Masayoshi Son just to name a few. This is the first major round of funding closed by Malta Inc.

The Need for Variable Energy Storage in the 21st Century

The system uses large vats of molten salt to store energy from variable energy sources such as solar or wind, and facilities can be constructed almost anywhere. Such methods of storing energy produced by variable energy sources will be a crucial in the future as the world moves further away from fossil fuels and toward clean energy. The state of California has said it intends to produced all its energy from carbon-free sources by the year 2045. Currently, as much as 30% of energy produced by variable sources in California is lost to inefficiencies in the system. Malta looks to reduce the figure.

Malta Inc. has yet to construct a working prototype of the new facility, but all indications point they are on the path to doing so. According to company CEO Ramya Swaminathan, the company is considering China as the location for this pilot project.